Thanos doesn't want to be here. This time they are actually running his lines, but it doesn't change the fact that he doesn't want to be here.
"'Hades, what do you want? Coin? Gold? I will give it to you.'" Niobe pauses, looking up as Xenia throws her some vague gesture. All Niobe can translate is the displeasure. "'I will give it to... you?'" she tries again.
"'Give me a queen!'" Thanos spits the moment she's finished. It is too bright out here. It is only he and the others, but that is still too many people. He is just as bored as he is during all the times Xenia called him here just to run everybody's lines but his.
"'If you only wanted a bride, I will find one for you. Understand me, Hades.'"
"'Zeus, you are not wise to make me wait!'"
"'Understand me, Zeus! I will get,'" Niobe looks down on the script and stumbles, losing her energy. "'I will give gladly all but what you have taken!'"
Thanos remains silent. That was the last line of the scene.
Xenia, exhausted from dealing with the myriad problems of her cast, doesn't comment or rebuke her. "Okay! That's it for you, Niobe." She stands from her chair. "You can go. Work on projecting a little more, okay?"
Niobe grumbles some noncommittal response and stomps off to the museum.
Xenia smooths her white skirt and walks down to the stage. The irony of a color so easily stained, so... absent. "Leaves you and me, Thanos."
He lifts his head to stare at her. "We don't need to run this scene. I'm leaving."
"Yeah, it's been a long day for all of us. Can you keep the attitude to a minimum?" Xenia scurries up on stage with script in hand. She doesn't beg or plead. She knows she doesn't have to.
She is not Persephone. They both know it.
"Okay," she says, a sigh entering her voice. She clears her throat and takes an audible breath. "'Look at her!'" her head snaps up to his, and she throws her hand wildly at the leaving Niobe. "'Does her love not move you?'"
Even though Niobe is fairly far off that this point, he can still hear her unenthusiastic muttering. He almost laughs at the irony.
Xenia notices. "Yes," she whispers. "Good."
Apparently she had mistaken it for acting.
Little does Xenia know that acting is nothing. It is not hard. Even Grigor sees that it is simply being, even if it is being something else.
"'Her grief, doesn't it reach into your chest and grip your heart?'"
Xenia is annoying him, so he chuckles as he stares her up and down, eyes lingering on the hem of her dress. "'I hear every wail, garments rent, teeth gnashed, curses spit at my name. It will pass.'" Maybe he'll scare her off, if there's any shred of virtue in her left. Maybe it'll get her to call this off early if she thinks this is any more than just a job to him.
Instead her eyes heat up in a lustful stare of her own. Her mouth parts slightly, and her lips turn outward into a pout. He doesn't know whether she's using the energy to drive the scene forward or whether she actually wants him. Either way, it makes no difference.
With that, she steps forward, snuggling up against his chest. Then she jerks upward and presses her mouth to his, her tongue sliding deftly along the roof of his mouth.
Thanos doesn't move except to blink, impatient with Xenia's approach.
She stumbles away, anger flashing in her eyes. "'My mother will never forget me!'"
"'She will.'" Thanos laughs, deep from his chest. "'And you will watch. You will see her forget you, bit by bit until you are just a whisper.'"
"'No!'" A little tremor enters Xenia's voice. In that moment he almost believes she is an innocent girl, a victim, so good an actor she is, but he knows better.
Xenia was the wiliest, most artful woman he had ever met.
"'You will sit until the years grind you from her thoughts, and only then will the chains binding you loose.'" Thanos smiles. "'And I promise you this, when you see your own mother forget your name. When you see her fill the world with life again though she swore she never would… then you will know the weakness of the living. You will give thanks and praise to Hades that I have given you such power.'"
"'Never!'" she barks, rooted to her spot.
"'No, my queen,'" Thanos whispers. "'Always.'"
"And scene!" Xenia announces. "Thanos, great energy. Love your approach. I might actually change the blocking for this scene. Get rid of the chains. Give Persephone another tactic."
"Do as you please." Thanos whips off his crown. "Just don't change the lines again."
"Whoa."
Neither Xenia nor Thanos look toward the wings, where Grigor stands with his mouth agape. "What was that?"
"Something else we tried," Xenia replies passively, marking up the script. "Go home, Grigor. We'll pick up with you tomorrow."
Thanos' eyes glide over her figure as she walks away. There is no pleasure in the underworld, physical or otherwise. The dead do not eat, drink, or fuck. He hasn't thought about sex since the divorce.
Hades and Persephone had not been blessed with children. Had they copulated, there would have been… results. And there were none, so they did not. That pleasure was alien, which perhaps was why Hades was so quick to seize her en route, when they were still above.
He smiled at the word. Blessed. There were no blessings in the underworld. There were also no curses.
Death just… was.
Everybody whining about the two men he had killed should have read Epicurus and been silenced. Their words made the blood rush to his ready hands. He had stopped listening and just watched their lips, but the movements sickened him, and he wanted to twist their heads. Those two men had given him power, as if he had absorbed their lives at the moment of taking them, and he felt the warm skin of their necks on each palm.
It was the most teetering moment of his life. Thanos never allowed himself to think after following protocol. During the execution of his orders, he had to. When Xenia was about to do something stupid, he had to. Afterward, though, he didn't reflect. It only made things messy. But if he had followed the sneers to his fists he would have snapped their necks, too, with that new power he wielded. If he had not thought, he would have left a gruesome trail. So he turned to his thoughts just enough that time.
Death was not bad for those two men. It was quick. They had not known of its arrival. Introductions always did seem pointless to Thanos.
He had been surprised at how quickly the two had come at him. As if they, too, wanted to skip introductions and go straight to killing him.
Then he realized, there were things his boss hadn't told him. To go in ready to fight, meant, there will be a death here tonight. Make sure it isn't yours.
The deaths had immediately fallen under the pretense of mourning, as if the deaths themselves were what was bad rather than the grievances of their selfish families. The whole affair would have been tidy were it not for their senseless wails, ostentatious grief. As if they could bring them back from the Underworld. They simply couldn't conduct themselves like men, with honor.
No, death was not bad for those two men.
But their lives had not belonged to him. They had not belonged to his boss, either.
They had not belonged to the market money he was protecting.
The truth was, their lives did not belong to anything remotely near to his grasp. He had stolen, just as they had tried to steal money that belonged to none of them. Kronos said it was theirs, but they had claimed it just as unfairly. This Thanos knew by the orders they gave him.
Small money, no gold bullion. Too cheap to say that they had died for a reason. That he should have taken those lives if only to leave a small pile of cash in exchange. No, that was ludicrous, once again proving the world absurd. These things happened every day. The blood didn't matter when it spilled from the skin of the ludicrous. It was cartoon murder.
They had lain there like animals slaughtered for a ritual. But there were no rituals. Not when everything lacked purpose.
In the amphitheater the sun is setting. Thanos can see dashes of blood smeared across the sky over the highest seats. It nearly matches the color of the set Niobe painted, and the light flush in Xenia's cheeks as she breathes in Narcissus flowers in the first scene of the play.
Thanos trudges over to the lift and rides it down. He doesn't like the way Grigor is looking at him.
Once at the bottom, Thanos touches his knuckles, seeing the faces of those to whom he answers in each of them. In the reflection of the water, he doesn't see himself anymore. He sees Kronos. He sees that his life doesn't belong to him anymore, and so his life is gone. So he resides in Hades.
Where he belongs with the death he brought to others.
He wonders if it would have been different, if he hadn't gotten tangled in the web of Kronos. Whether he would have failed to learn the truth of life's absurdity, whether he would have been better off without it. Whether he would have lived in a better world had his eyes been virgins to blood.
Whether he would have thought from oblivion that this was the way others should live their lives, knowing that their hands had touched the blood of others, knowing the total lack of significance of everything in their world, knowing that they belonged wholly to something else.
Whether he would look into the lustrous eyes of the young and motivated and sneer.
Thanos knows who he is. He is Hades. He is the foil of Midas. Everything he touches turns to ash.
But though he lives in the Underworld, he is not like all the others.
He has thought about it, joining them, running a knife through the skin between his chin and his Adam's apple. Thanos hates his skin because it is the only stop to his power. His life is a ludicrous speck on a ludicrous world, and he wants to know what he gave to the two men. He wants to know the truth behind the variances of what people say, if death is a gift, a curse, a release. He suspects it's simpler than all of that, that death is just an event, like acting is just being, that the value judgment people attach to death is of no consequence because it is attached while they are living. He wants to die so he can add it to his resume. There it will be, a tiny corner of a tiny piece of paper soaked cerise. That is his only desire left in a faded world, more than the coolness of drink or the hotness of a home between legs.
And after death Kronos will still be looking for him. He'll be handed back the resume and told to proceed. The rival godfathers will draw string around his feet. The two men dead will battle over his throat. And still there is no purpose, no consequence.
That desire is the only natural one, for in the world of the dead he is still a stranger.
A long time ago, Thanos would have reviled another for abandoning his thoughts to deal with the moment. A long time ago, he would have glanced but once at a woman like Xenia and taken her to his bed.
He embraces it, offering his open wounds and watching as Hades laps up his blood and his eyes start to glow. This is his role now, from nature and from necessity.
Around him, people are little better than dolls. What substance they think lies beneath them is illusory.
Yet may they never have to know this life.
AN: The preliminary rehearsal dialogue (until "Understand me, Zeus!...") is borrowed from the last audio file in the game. The rest is borrowed from the script that follows from that point. I confess I was hoping for HER to go in a different direction with Thanos, so this is sort of my reconciliation with the character as they represent him. I worked from his more vulnerable moments in the game-namely the bits of dialogue about people coming for him after he dies and protecting investments that he thought were special-and tried to get his voice just right. I'm thinking about doing one for Grigor, too, since his backstory is so fascinating. So is Niobe's, but hers is pretty self-explanatory.
On Epicurus-he basically said that people shouldn't dread death because death isn't bad (meaning the moment of death and not the disease, if applicable, leading up to it)... the worst part is dreading it. Remember Kite Runner when Amir's father said that all crimes were derived from stealing? Yeah, that idea comes into play a bit here. Also, I took inspiration from Camus' absurdism. Really wacky theory, but it works for some people, I guess. Oh, and Bach's Toccata and Fugue comprised the soundtrack for this blithe, frolicking piece.